ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on popular culture Storch particularly emphasized the importance of the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act in tightening the grip of the London police on working-class street life. The argument that the new professional police forces in nineteenth-century England were willing and effective agents of middle-class control of working-class social and moral behaviour has been so often repeated that it is in danger of becoming accepted as a fact. From the start, and especially in the difficult field of popular morality and street behaviour, the two Metropolitan Police Commissioners tried to tread a path midway between laxity and tyranny, between the demands of 'respectability' and the practical necessity for good relations with the working-class majority. The Hyde Park riot against the Sunday Trading Bill in July 1855, which the police were unable to control, was a vindication of Mayne's position. Metropolitan Police attitudes towards fairs involved a similar compromise between control and toleration.
